courts, with popularly elected
representatives, and apparently with all the necessary machinery for
dealing out equal justice, one suddenly sees a feudal despotism arise,
as if by magic, to usurp the political, judicial, and military powers of
a great state, and to use them to arrest hundreds without warrant and
throw them into "bull pens"; to drive hundreds of others out of their
homes and at the point of the bayonet out of the state; to force others
to labor against their will or to be beaten; to depose the duly elected
officials of the community; to insult the courts; to destroy the
property of those who protest; and even to murder those who show signs
of revolt--one stands aghast. It makes one wonder just how far in
reality we are removed from barbarism. Is it possible that the
likelihood of the workers achieving an eight-hour day--which was all
that was wanted in Colorado--could lead to civil war? Yet that is what
might and perhaps should have happened in Colorado in 1904, when, for a
few months, a military despotism took from the people there all that had
been won by centuries of democratic striving and thrust them back into
the Middle Ages.

Chaotic political and industrial conditions are, of course, occasionally
inevitable in modern society--torn as it is by the very bitter struggle
going on constantly between capital and labor. When this struggle breaks
into war, as it often does, we are bound to suffer some of the evils
that invariably attend war. Certainly, it is to be expected that the
owners of property will exercise every power they possess to safeguard
their property. They will, whenever possible, use the State and all its
coercive powers in order to retain their mastery over men and things.
The only question is this, must people in general continue to be the
victims of a commerce which has for its purpose the creation of
situations that force nearly every industrial dispute to become a bloody
conflict? When men combine to commit depredations, destroy property,
and murder individuals, society must deal with them--no matter how
harshly. But it is an altogether different matter to permit privately
paid criminals to create whenever desired a state of anarchy, in order
to force the military to carry out ferocious measures of repression
against those who have been in no wise responsible for disorder.

If we will look into this matter a little, we shall discover certain
sinister motives back of this work of t